Can museums really keep up with modern developments and changing public attitudes to science and art? London’s Science Museum is about to find out

DORON SWADE, curator of computing at London's Science Museum, was a very worried man. In front of him stood five-and-a-half tonnes of Victorian engineering—the mechanical calculating engine and printer that had been built according to plans drawn up in the 1840s by Charles Babbage, a computing pioneer. Nothing had come of Babbage's designs during his lifetime; construction began only in the 1990s when Mr Swade decided to see if Babbage's calculating engine actually worked. By March this year, construction was finally complete. The printer had been carefully attached to the calculating engine via a set of interlocking cogs, ready for its unveiling the following day. But after a few cranks of the handle, the mechanism jammed. Mr Swade could not work out why.

The problem, he muttered, was that Babbage failed to leave behind any instructions for troubleshooting. Fortunately, by the following afternoon the problem had been identified and solved, and a visibly relieved Mr Swade was ready for his grand unveiling. What he had overcome were the unexpected difficulties of getting a contraption designed in the 19th century to work in the 21st.

That, as it happens, is exactly the problem faced by the world's science museums. How should showcases of industry and technology, originally pioneered in Victorian times or earlier, respond to the changing demands of the modern world? Museums face many challenges. They are expected to cover complex and fast-changing topics such as cosmology, computing and genetics, but research in these fields is advancing so quickly that exhibits may be out of date before they even open. At the same time, museums must avoid the arrogant tone that scientists are often accused of using when addressing the public. There is also the question of how best to incorporate “virtual” exhibits, both within the museum and online.

So when planning began a few years ago for the Science Museum's new wing, its director Sir Neil Cossons and his colleagues decided to tackle these problems head-on. The result, the £50m ($75m) Wellcome wing, which will be officially opened by the queen on June 27th, involves a daring combination of innovations in presentation, content and technology.

Do science museums really need to be reinvented? The short answer is yes, because the traditional approach to running a science museum will no longer work. Sir Neil says that when he took over as director in 1986, one exhibit boasted a caption speculating that, some day, men might walk on the moon. At the time, the museum was run in much the same fusty way as the British Museum: exhibition areas were renovated one by one in a slow rotation. Each update might cost millions and take months, but would then be left unchanged for 20 years. This is a fine way to exhibit Chinese pottery, or 18th-century surgical instruments, but it is no use at all for modern science and technology.

So in 1992, the museum launched a new initiative called Science Box, in order to put together new exhibits within three months in response to news events or breakthroughs. Over the years, Science Box has covered many topics including passive smoking, DNA fingerprinting, and infertility treatments. The new wing extends this idea: its ground floor exhibition, “Antenna”, will consist of constantly updated exhibits, some prepared in as little as 24 hours, and others put together over the course of no more than six weeks. This will allow the museum to respond to news events, and to update its exhibits when things change. Partnerships with scientific publishers mean that the museum will be given advance warning of major stories. This will make it possible, says Sir Neil, for someone to hear about something on the morning news, and then walk into the museum at 10am and see an exhibit explaining it in more detail.

Market research showed that visitors to the museum wanted more than just timeliness, however. They also demanded better coverage of two of the fastest-moving scientific fields: computing and biomedicine. So the first and second floors of the new wing are devoted to these two subjects alone. Again, flexibility is vital, and this is reflected in the architecture: the wing's three upper floors are huge, suspended deck-like structures. There are no fixed walls, and each deck is hollow, allowing technicians to run compressed air, electricity and data feeds to wherever they are needed. The wing's architect, Richard MacCormac, refers to it as a “theatre of science” able to respond quickly to scene changes and new productions.

What about virtual exhibits? The biomedical exhibition, “Who Am I?” will let visitors make scans of themselves and enter other information, which they will be able to save and carry with them as they travel around the museum. This will be made possible through the use of fingerprint scanners which will identify individual visitors and enable them to call up and modify their own data at any terminal. As they leave the museum, they will be issued with a password, so that they can subsequently call up this information over the Internet, from home or school. Janet Carding, one of the curators of the new exhibitions, admits that getting all of this to work will be quite a feat.

The third floor of the new wing, “In Future”, takes a novel approach to predicting what is to come, something that science museums often get embarrassingly wrong. Not only are such predictions liable to be proven incorrect, they can also come across as patronising: this is the future, they imply, because that's what a bunch of scientists have decided. “In Future” is an attempt to avoid these mistakes by presenting a range of future scenarios, by admitting the existence of scientific controversy, and by emphasising the role of the public in determining which future will come to pass.

The exhibit takes the form of a multi-player computer game in which visitors are invited to explore a particular subject, such as the possibility of male pregnancy. Once the game is over, players vote to indicate their views on the subject. As well as being able to see how their own views differ from those of other players, visitors can inspect a tally of all votes to date, which gives them an indication of broader public opinion.

Other exhibits in the new wing include an Imax cinema, a children's exhibit called “Pattern Pod”, and “Live Science”, where scientists will perform genuine research inside the museum in conjunction with visitors. An early project will involve collecting facial scans and DNA samples in an attempt to identify the relationship between the two.

Some of these ideas—interactive displays, opinion polls—have been tried elsewhere, and recent exhibits in many science museums have acknowledged controversy or uncertainty in science, and the role of the public in directing research and deciding what is and is not acceptable. The Wellcome wing is, however, unique in using the public's changing view of science as the organising principle for an entire museum. It will not be easy, and it will not be cheap—keeping the exhibits updated is expected to cost around £3m a year. But curators of other science museums around the world will be watching closely. If it all works, and if people actually like it, the Wellcome wing may come to be seen as the prototype for an entirely new kind of science museum—a museum of the future, indeed.